Projects at Academic Institutions

These academic-based projects represent efforts by students, faculty, and community to confront histories of eugenics, medical racism, and slavery and their contemporary implications for knowledge production and institutional policy.

The AECY has noted these projects’ stated intentions, collaborative dimensions, impact, and outcomes. There are nine (9) featured academic work-based projects that range from undergraduate courses to archival reconstructions to top-down research. Most of the Universities reviewed are located in the United States.

On this page

1- Our Takeaways

2- University of Pennsylvania: Penn Medicine & the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS)

3- University College London: Legacies of Eugenics Project

4- Stanford University: Eugenics and Scientific Racism at Stanford and Beyond

5- University of California, Berkeley: “Remembering Eugenics at Berkeley and in California”

6- Caltech - 2020 Committee on Naming and Recognition (CNR)

7- University of Virginia: President’s Commission on Slavery, Universities Studying Slavery Consortium

8- National Human Genome Research Institute: The Eugenics Archive

9- University of Vermont: Eugenics research website

10- Yale University: Yale and Slavery Project

Use this menu to navigate to your section of interest

 Our takeaways

  • Who in particular do we want to invoke and bring into this conversation?

    A key of part of the vision for an anti-eugenics future is a collective re-imagining of human value and worth. In doing this, it’s important to center people, communities, and experiences that exist outside of institutions, as well as those who have historically been marginalized and targeted by eugenic logics.

    This means that our work must strive to operate on a level that is open to critique and that doesn’t have the accessibility barriers typical of some academic work.

  • Bringing people in from all different fields and areas of work is just as integral to anti-eugenics as it was to the American Eugenics Movement, which brought together politicians, scientists, geographers, and so on.

    More academic collaboration across departments is one of our long-term goals to build a sustainable anti-eugenics framework that is not limited to a particular discipline, and prevents placing the burden on a small group of scholars to dismantle institutional pasts which have been in place for decades.

  • Our outreach and collaborative efforts are important in guiding the direction of the project and its scope of impact. We must be mindful of the fact that our work is originating from within an institution which has fundamentally shaped eugenic thought and logics. How are we positioning ourselves in this work?

    As we focus on New Haven, Connecticut, and the Northeast, how are we making connections? Wards? Labor unions? K-12 curricular efforts?

  • After looking at many examples of top-down or administratively-charged academic projects, it became clear that material outcomes were important to think about going into our work.

    How can we be intentional with our work and ensure that it does more than just make observations and document histories, but actually find ways to contribute and further theories of change based around fundamental anti-eugenic tenets?

  • A big part of our work is engaging in self-reflection and understanding our positionality as we engage in this work. What do we have to lose? What do we have to gain?

    Who should we bring on to support our work? And how can academia and activism come together?

  • Our goal with this collective is to exist outside of the administrative presence or domain of the University, to allow our efforts to be guided by true anti-eugenic intentions, rather than aesthetic purposes.

    Our research, though, must go beyond individuals and reach at the systemic presence of eugenics. Shame alone does not meaningfully move institutional policy.

    What gets the university to respond? What kind of response are we looking for?

  • Given histories of contestation and institutional efforts to stymie momentum, we must avoid getting swallowed up by the bubble of our institution and ground ourselves in public discourse.

    Can this project ever have an end, or is the work fundamentally never-ending in its questioning of normative assumptions and value systems?

By analyzing the aims, mechanisms, and outcomes of these university projects, we came up with a couple key takeaways to implement and key in mind for our own work.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA:

Penn Medicine & the Afterlives of Slavery Project (PMAS)

Image description: The logo for the Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery project. It is a black Caduceus with a stethoscope and shackle wrapped around the staff.

Penn Medicine & the Afterlives of Slavery (PMAS)

  • Investigates how undergraduate medical students, both past and present, are taught to think about the role of race in medicine.

  • The project was created following public outrage at the discovery of Black Philadelphians’ remains in medical school and private collections. In some ways, then, the institutionalization of the original UPenn and Slavery Project, of which the Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery is an offshoot, was a result of institutional anxieties about public image and reputation.

Context on UPenn Medical School

  • The University of Pennsylvania was not only the first medical school in the United States, but it was also affiliated with the nation’s first hospital (The Pennsylvania Hospital) and the first teaching hospital (the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania). This project documents the history of Penn’s medical school and its complicity with enslavement and offers pathways to move forward that acknowledge and rectify this relationship.

Image description: Professor Dorothy Roberts poses with her hand under her chin. The cover of her book is tomato with “Killing the Black Body” in bold black text.

Project’s findings & outcomes

  • Research and document the School of Medicine’s history and its connections to enslavement.

  • Employ historical research to make recommendations to Penn, the medical profession, and policymakers around issues of 1) medical education and curriculum development which deals honestly and openly with race; 2) minority community engagement; and 3) addressing and solving implicit and explicit forms of bias at the multiple levels of health care delivery.

  • Some of the project’s key accomplishments include a variety of public-facing and academic articles on Penn Medicine’s and the medical field’s connections to slavery including, for example, “Misrepresenting Race — The Role of Medical Schools in Propagating Physician Bias” by a team of researchers including the project’s head Dorothy Roberts.

Image description: A busy intersection in front of the impressively glass facade of the Penn Medical Center.

Key strengths

  • An important intervention the project makes is in drawing a clear line between the medical field’s historical ties to slavery and present-day physician bias and medical education. In other words, the researchers make clear that the effects of this history are felt by patients today.

  • Aims to make information accessible to the public through public facing websites, programming, and collaborations with the public.

  • Collaboration with community-based partners

    • Host publicly accessible programming (Speakers & Symposia); Present our research through a publicly accessible website; Facilitate collaborations and partnerships between Penn and the public

Further reading

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (UCL):

Legacies of Eugencics Project

The header for the project. Alternating black and white text in large font against a red background is the website url: LegaciesofEugenics.org. Below, in smaller black text, it reads: "Investigating histories of eugenics around UCL.

UCL Legacies of Eugenics Project

  • UCL is linked directly to the origins of eugenics through its connection to Francis Galton, who coined the term in 1883 as a derivation of a Greek word meaning "good in birth." Although Galton never held an academic post (at UCL or elsewhere), he did have a laboratory based at UCL where he pursued research into eugenics through biometric surveys, starting in 1904.

  • Following Galton's passing in 1911, he left a fund to establish a Professor of Eugenics position at UCL, which was filled by Karl Pearson. With Pearson's appointment, the Department of Statistics was formed — the first in the world. Both Galton and Pearson contributed to the development of statistics. Karl Pearson also founded the Galton Laboratory in 1907. In the late 90s, the lab was integrated into UCL's Biology department.

Context on the Project and Public Pressure

  • In the last few years, a student and faculty-led inquiry project has documented this history and compelled the university to issue a formal apology. Student pressure and protests were integral to spurring progress on this front.

    • The London Conference of Intelligence sparked the controversy that led to the creation of the Legacies of Eugenics Project. In 2018, there was public outcry surrounding this conference, which discussed eugenic attitudes and was attended by 16 UCL faculty members from different departments.

Project's Methods, Findings, & Outcomes 

Methods

  • Reviewed thousands of archives that related to eugenics and developed a guide to studying eugenics at UCL for publication

  • Conducted a survey to investigate broader opinions about what should be done regarding the history of eugenics, both at UCL and more generally

  • Gathered evidence from 40 expert witnesses and held several town hall meetings

Findings & Outcomes

  • Conducted deep dive research into specific departments at UCL, including their preeminent statistics department

  • Publicly shared their research findings in part through a series of podcasts

  • UCL issued a formal apology and changed or removed the names of buildings previously named for eugenicists

  • Sparked discussions on how to repurpose money from the Galton Fund; asked questions of who was previously benefitting from the Galton Fund money within the institution and why

Key Strengths

  • We were able to interview Maria Kiladi, one of the researchers on the project. She explained that the project’s findings were met with little to no resistance or skepticism.

  • In order for this project and investigation to happen, the UCL administration had to be willing to engage directly with the facts of its past (and present, as the Conference of Intelligence demonstrated) support of eugenics. The administration's support of the research is a clear strength to the project and its success.

Further Reading

STANFORD UNIVERSITY:

Eugenics and Scientific Racism at Stanford and Beyond

Overview

"Eugenics and Scientific Racism at Stanford and Beyond" is a project supported by the Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics and the Program in the History of Science at Stanford . Their public facing project is a digital gallery which explores how a multitude of Stanford administrators and professors used their positions at the University and in their field to promote eugenics and scientific racism. This gallery features David Starr Jordan, the first president of Stanford, Lewis Terman, a professor of educational psychology, Thomas A. Storey, a professor at the School of Hygiene, and more. 

Background

Stanford is a Gilded Age university, and its founding in 1885 had major implications for their mission as an institution of knowledge production. Their initial purpose was to be a leader in the sciences, psychology, and sociology. They were perceived as a "progressive" institution dedicated to scientific advancement and the improvement of society. It is crucial to note that Stanford was funded by a robber baron, Leland Stanford. Stanford was a notorious industrialist recognized for his innovation in the mercantile industry and the railroad industry. Understanding this origin is pivotal to explaining why Stanford played such a crucial role in the propagation of eugenics. Their founders and their first president pushed "progressive" values such as industry, social Darwinism, and racial purity. Jordan was integral to the creation of the "great replacement” narrative -- a narrative which claims that the "great" white race is slowly being eradicated through interracial mixing and immigration. In addition, he personally undertook efforts in faculty recruitment and selected several eugenicists to be leaders in the university. This includes Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, the Dean of the Stanford School of Education in 1898. Cubberley's research promoted ideas of inherited intelligence, gifted testing and programming, and market-oriented education. He firmly belied that that educational testing could identify “naturally talented” students (Anglo-Saxon, upper class). Once these students were identified, they were shaped for careers in leadership. In addition, his belief in regular testing to optimize results in schools remains prevalent today in the charter school movement.  

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY:

Remembering Eugenics at Berkeley and in California

Professor Susan Schweik’s Course 

Assisted by Dr. Tony Platt, Professor Susan Schweik teaches a course on eugenics at Berkeley that is comparable to our own ER&M 391. Professor Schweik's work and focus is largely informed by her background in disability studies; however, her curriculum covers an interdisciplinary approach to the histories and legacies of eugenics of different institutions tied to Berkeley's campus, such as the university, the surrounding town, and California at large. Dr. Platt, a lifelong activist, became involved in anti-eugenic research and activism through his investigation of Berkley's telling of its own history. Throughout Berkley, plaques, memorials, and sites glorify eugenicists who professionally and materially benefitted from violence against Native peoples.

Ignorance of the racial ideologies of donors and honorees is widespread. Not only has Berkeley named its special collections library after a violent racist and erected statues to celebrate the displacement of Indigenous peoples, but the city and university bear the name of an apologist for slavery. More recently, the 2020 discovery of a "Eugenics" fund available through the Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund, which was shared with faculty members as a source of research funding, reinvigorated calls for Berkeley to acknowledge its role in the legacy of eugenics.  

Strengths

Schweik's course hopes to confront Berkeley's history through student projects, education, and collaborative activism. Not only can we learn from the materials and readings engaged in her curriculum, but the final project of the course is an example of a potential outcome for work production in this class in a tangible manner, as it involves the creation of a walking tour identifying ties to Eugenics across the campus. When we met with Platt and Schweik as a group last week, they both noted the importance of education to this work. Many affiliated with the university, including students, are unfamiliar with the institution's eugenic history. Education, they stressed should therefore emphasize accessibility to the public over professional and institutional reward.

CALTECH:

2020 Committee on Naming and Recognition

In 2020, Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum established the Committee on Naming and Recognition (CNR) to re-evaluate the use of Robert A. Millikan's name on campus buildings. The committee included Caltech students, faculty, alumni, trustees, and others in the Caltech community after sustained student activism and the circulation of petitions from the Black Scientists and Engineers of Caltech (BSEC) and other alumni.

Background

Millikan was Caltech's founding president and first Nobel laureate, transforming the school from a local, relatively unknown entity to one of the nation's leading universities in engineering and the sciences. However, Millikan was also a eugenicist; he was a trustee to the Human Betterment Foundation, a prominent eugenics group that supported forced sterilization legislation in California and used medical pseudoscience as propaganda for their ideas. He also expressed racist, sexist, and xenophobic views, even giving the U.S. military a list of Japanese Caltech students and alumni during World War II. In January 2021, Rosenbaum and the CNR announced that all campus buildings, assets, and honors named after Millikan and other Caltech eugenicists would be renamed -- for example, the Robert A. Millikan Memorial Library was renamed Caltech Hall, and one of the residence halls was renamed after Grant Venerable, the first Black student to graduate from Caltech.

Project Aims and Findings

The CNR examined archival documents from the Human Betterment Foundation and from Millikan's personal correspondences that were found in Caltech's libraries to make their recommendations. They also invited historians and scholars of racism to advise the committee and sent out surveys to members of the Caltech community to gauge public opinion. One of the CNR's key findings was that Millikan was not simply “a man of his time”; he continued to support eugenics long after it had been discredited by the wider academy. Moreover, when the Human Betterment Foundation dissolved in 1942, Caltech accepted its assets and used the money to support research in genetics. Finally, their surveys showed that only 45% of respondents supported removing the names of Millikan and other Human Betterment Foundation members from campus buildings, with the opponents citing "cancel culture" and the "erasure of history." 

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA (UVA):

Presdient's Commission on Slavery, Universities Studying Slavery Consortium

Overview

University of Virginia (UVA) is among a group of research institutions whose faculty, administration and students have engaged in a multi-year project to document the university's history of involvement in slavery and the slave trade. UVA also hosts the website for a project called Universities Studying Slavery that involves dozens of institutions doing similar work.

UVA has spearheaded the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium since 2016. According to the Consortium’s website, it is intended to facilitate collaboration between different institutions seeking to address histories of slavery and their own links to such histories. The Consortium holds an annual summer program for high schoolers in as well as semi-annual symposiums dedicated to bringing together scholars, students, and activists across member institutions. The Consortium’s news page contains updates regarding the institutions that have joined the initiative, as well as descriptions of the efforts taken up by students and staff to address the ties to slavery held by their respective institutions. In conjunction with the efforts linked to the consortium, UVA has also expanded curricular offerings related to slavery and its legacies by launching courses such as “Slavery and its Legacies at UVA” and “The Aftermath of Slavery at UVA.”

Multiple graves of enslaved individuals have been found throughout UVA’s history. This occurred as recently as 2012, when landscaping crews came across grave shafts that likely belonged to enslaved individuals. These “discoveries” have been accompanied by the installation of memorials across campus, such as a memorial installed in 2007 and placed next to the Rotunda that acknowledged the role of enslaved people’s in helping “to realize Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia.” While these memorials have contributed to the ongoing campus-wide reckoning with the institution’s deep historical ties to slavery, some memorials dedicated to enslaved people’s, such as the one placed next to the Rotunda, adopt phrasing that continue to portray Thomas Jefferson, in particular, in a favorable light.

Timeline + Impacts

2007 - UVA Board of Visitors (the corporate board for the University of Virginia, appointed by the Governor) releases a statement acknowledging the legacy of slavery and UVA's particular involvement, after the Virginia General Assembly passed a resolution expressing regret for the state's role in the slave trade.

2009 - Frank Dukes founds University and Community Action for Racial Equity (UCARE), which aims to find ways "to understand the University's role in slavery, racial segregation and discrimination, and addressing and repairing the legacy of those harms."

2010 - Ishraga Eltahir helps to found the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers (MEL).

2010 - IDEA (Identity, Diversity, Equity, and Access) group is founded.

2012 - Graves of enslaved individuals are unearthed by landscaping crews working on expanding the university cemetery northward. 

2012 - A marker celebrating the life of the bell ringer Henry Martin was placed on campus later. Some faculty believe this singling out of this individual history works counterproductively to push the pro-slavery narrative of the “loyal slave.”

January 2013 - "Slavery at the University of Virginia: A Catalogue of Current and Past Initiatives" by Meghan Faulkner, funded by UVA's IDEA (Inclusion Diversity Equity Access) fund, describes discoveries, initiatives, and opportunities. The catalogue addresses the limitation of it's format that it is a static document.

September 2013 - The President's Commission on Slavery and the University is created. The Commission involves both tenured faculty, students, and a couple community partners.

2018 - The President's Commission on Slavery and the University produces a report to University President Teresa A. Sullivan.

Positive Takeaways:

Increased dialogue The path to understanding and repair begins with open conversation about topics that have been infrequently discussed among those in the University community. More opportunities for conversation are needed at UVA and beyond.

Public engagement Visible memorials, workshops, coffees, public presentations, meetings in schools and churches, etc were valuable in engaging with the broader community. Some collaboration with community partners. Development of the Cornerstone Summer Institute for high school students.

Involvement of the Student Body Modifications to University Guide student tours, creation of "Slavery and its Legacies" course.

Beyond History/American Studies President's Commission mentions hopes for courses across the disciplines that confront slavery and racism in the school’s past (such as Chemistry and Biology).

Sources

NATIONAL HUMAN GENOME RESEARCH INSTITUTE:

The Eugenics Archive

What is the Eugenics Archive?

The Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement was created by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, founded in 1890, and its Dolan DNA Learning Center, founded in 1988, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The website, a kind of artifact in and of itself, was funded by a grant from the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute. It provides an interdisciplinary recount of the eugenics movement, with attractions like its archive image database, virtual exhibits, and its DNA interactive site—its most recent installment in 2003. 

The archive image database compiled 2200+ primary sources from 11 archives including the American Philosophical Society Library, Archiv zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives, International Center of Photography, National Park Service, Rockefeller Archive Center, Truman State University, University at Albany, University College London, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the University of Virginia. Over one hundred of the primary sources allow keyword searches that scan the text content as well as the title of images containing text. Topics in the database include Birth and population control, the Buck vs. Bell Trial, Circus Performers, Criminality, Criticism of Eugenics, Eugenics Record Office (ERO), Family Trait Forms, Fitter Family Contests, Francis Galton, German/Nazi Eugenics, Hereditary Disorders, Immigration, Mate Selection and Counseling, Mendelian Heredity, Mental Illness, Pedigrees, Physical and Intellectual Measurement, Poverty and Degeneracy, Race Mixing and Marriage Laws, Race and Ethnicity, Religion, Sterilization Laws, and Twin Studies.

The virtual exhibits are short essays written by historians, geneticists, lawyers, and academics. The topics include Social Origins, Scientific Origins, Research Methods, Traits Studied, Research Flaws, Eugenics Popularization, Marriage Laws, Sterilization Laws, and Immigration Restriction. The essays embed supporting primary sources from the archive and list the references in a separate exhibit titled Author Information & References. The authors of these essays include Garland Allen, a since-retired biology professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in the history of 20th century biology. Writing about the Scientific Origins of Eugenics, Elof Carlson is a since-retired geneticist who studies the history of science with an interest in eugenics at SUNY Stony Brook. Paul Lombardo is another author who is a historian and lawyer who teaches bioethics and health law at the University of Virginia. David Micklos, the author of the essay on Research Methods, is director of the Dolan DNA Learning Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York and is co-principal investigator of the Eugenics Archive Project. Additional authors include Steven Selden, since-retired program coordinator of the Curriculum Theory and Development Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Jan Witkowski, director of the Banbury Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York and co-principal investigator of the Eugenics Archive Project. 

Strengths

With such a large database of primary sources, the Eugenics Archive is useful as a research tool, as well as a platform to learn more about the history of eugenics and its wide-reaching, interdisciplinary nature. The site has two main components: virtual exhibits and a searchable archive. 

In the archive image database, one key strength is that they provide contextual information and descriptors for each source. When you open a specific topic in the archive, they provide several paragraphs to help the reader understand the social, economic, cultural, and political contexts surrounding these primary sources. This is particularly useful as they allow users to put these documents into the larger context of the eugenics movement and how they were potentially used. In addition to the summary paragraphs, they curate pages of newspaper articles, photos, pedigrees, exhibits, data, and other objects or pieces produced during the period. These are organized by topics such as criminality, Better Baby Contests, mental illness, and more. 

UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT:

Eugenics research website

An Introduction

The Vermont Eugenics Survey – an expansive academic effort to collect data about the Vermont population – formalized eugenicists ideology within the state.

  • As eugenics took hold across the country, Henry Farnham Perkins felt a sense of urgency to establish such practices within his state. Perkins was born of Mayflower descent to a wealthy family. After his marriage to another descendent of the Mayflower, he began working as an associate professor at the University of Vermont. In 1922, Perkins was fascinated by the World War I drafting exams that evaluated the physical and mental health of potential soldiers. He found the tests’ focus on degeneracy to be particularly important. This fascination manifested in founding the Vermont Eugenics Survey.

  • He, alongside several progressive academics from the university, worked in tandem to study rural Vermont residents. They categorized people based on their “degeneracy,” specifically focusing on people with Huntington’s, “people who live on houseboats,” and dark-skinned individuals. The blatant racialization of this supposedly neutral work becomes visible through their fieldwork and efforts to “purify” the population. The work performed by Perkins and other coworkers eventually received enough funding to conduct widespread research and begin forced sterilizations.

  • After the constitutionalization of forced sterilization in 1927, Vermont followed suit by mandating sterilizations for the “unfit.” 

The ramifications of these policies show not only in the number of people forcibly sterilized but also in its continued presence in contemporary society. The University of Vermont has only recently changed the names of buildings that were previously named for prominent eugenicists from the 20th century. Additionally, after nine decades from the passing of Vermont’s sterilization law, state officials have acknowledged and apologized for these policies. As the contemporary world grapples with its historical legacies, academics and politicians alike must feel a similar sense of urgency that Perkins felt, but instead with the goal of amending the systems that allow for such destruction.

Sources: Article 1, Article 2

Eugenics: Compulsory Sterilization in 50 American States

This website – created by students at the University of Vermont – arose out of the need to document the history of sterilization. While most states have yet to acknowledge and address the legacy of compulsory sterilizations, this website provides an overview of sterilization laws in all states. For each state, this website provide several pieces of information:

  • Number of sterilization victims

  • Time period during which sterilization occurred

  • Laws passed regarding sterilization, including which groups were targeted

  • Other restrictions place on those identified in the law

  • Institutions where sterilizations were performed

  • Opposition to sterilization

Vermont Findings: 

  • 253 sterilizations performed, making it the 25th highest in the nation → ⅔ were performed on women

  • Most sterilizations occurred between 1931-1941

  • Passed sterilization law on March 1931, targeting “‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’, ‘feeble-minded,’ and ‘insane’ persons”

  • Usually included Native peoples, French-Canadians, people living in poverty, and people with disabilities

  • Established restrictions on the marriage of a person defined with the words above; couples who wished to wed were first examined by a physician and were then issued a health certificate if they passed

  • Major sites of compulsory sterilization included Brandon School of the Feeble-Minded, Vermont State Hospital for the Insane, and Vermont Reform School

  • Religious opposition from Catholic communities of both Irish and French Canadians, but they held no political power – no significant protest against eugenics existed

Strengths

  • Contains sterilization information about all states in an easily accessible way

  • Each state is organized into different sections of information, making it more digestible

  • Includes graphs and photos to allow for better understanding

  • Generally, a groundbreaking project (no website like this has ever existed)

 http://www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/studiesf.html

This is a documentary website that guides the viewer through a history of Eugenics in Vermont, specifically highlighting the Eugenics Survey of Vermont. This guide is very easy to follow and provides a magnitude of links that encompass a great deal of Eugenics history in Vermont in a comprehensible way. The viewer can start at the “start here” button and follow the history chronologically, or jump between time periods and topics as they please. Each section contains:

  • Informative paragraphs on the topic at hand

  • A sidebar with a relevant documents/primary source list

  • Links to the previous and upcoming sections 

  • Illustrations

Findings

  • After 1900, leaders in Vermont sought a survey that could "scientifically" uncover the root of Vermont's social issues. 

  • Henry F. Perkins, a zoology professor, established the Eugenics Survey of Vermont, which would run from 1925-1936.

  • The survey was completed through conducting interviews and house visits and relying on word of mouth to seek out the most “dependent and delinquent families.” This information was used to make pedigrees of the “handicapped families” found." There were several different types of surveys, with just some focusing on the rural poor, "feebleminded women," families identified as having "bad heredity," and school children. 

  • Perkins supported negative Eugenics and campaigned for sterilization laws in 1927. In 1928, three years into the survey, he admitted that his original science was not appropriately sound, but continued running the survey anyways. 

  • In 1932, the Ethnic Study of Burlington was launched by Elin Anderson, Assistant Director of the Eugenics Survey, who took the surveys in a completely new direction. Using the same methods as Perkins, Anderson sought to highlight the social and environmental factors that impact status and achievement outside of race and heredity. She emphasized the need for diversity and worked to change the views of Eugenicists from the inside out. 

  • The survey ended in 1936; however, Eugenics education continued all over the state, and practices such as forced sterilization occurred for years to come under the watch of the Department of Public Welfare. 

YALE UNIVERSITY:

Yale and Slavery Project

The Yale and Slavery Project

  • The Yale and Slavery Working Group (YSWG) was created by the Office of the President as one of the President's committees (as with much of this information, there is a taxonomy as the working group fits deep within President Salovey’s administration). The Committee’s mission is “to investigate Yale’s historic entanglements and associations with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition.”

  • The group is led by David Blight (Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of America Studies) and includes Yale students and community members tasked with the researching the university’s history to shed light on its connections to slavery and abolition.

  • The group was established in October 2020, and in October 2021, the research was concluded and presented in a publicly accessible academic conference. The Office of the President hopes that the “findings will help ups come to a better understanding of Yale will contribute to the scholarship on slavery and abolition more broadly.” Per a YaleNews press release, after the conference, President Salovey announced initial goals Yale will take in order to reckon with the Group’s discoveries: “creation of permanent memorialization of the enslaved and indigenous people who played vital roles in the community but whose stories have been forgotten; a meaningful increase in the university’s direct financial support for its home city of New Haven; and collaborations with the nation’s Historically Black and Tribal Colleges and Universities.” The project concluded, with recommendations and a report about the research, by mid-2022.

Annotated Bibliography 

  • Yale and Slavery working group website

    • This website is a landing page for the research and work related to the Yale and Slavery Working Group (YSWG). One can find descriptions of members, research assistants, and staff who make up YSWG, past and upcoming events related to the working group, featured research, resources related to YSWG as well as featured articles from the news related to the working group. It is a fairly comprehensive website that contains background and ongoing work related to YSWG. It is also fairly easy to navigate.

  • YaleSlavery.org

    • This resource, created by a graduate student, is incredibly helpful for understanding the way the university is built around legacies of slavery. It enumerates the connections between the each of the residential college’s namesakes and slavery as well as donor’s slavery ties. The site also maps out abolitionists connected to the university and their resistance at the time. This incredible site actually demonstrates how powerful categorization tools can be for unpacking and charting out this university legacy.

  • Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal

    • This site serves as a central database to connect researchers with resources related to slavery which are held in Yale libraries and around Yale’s campus. The website has a page for each library which includes links to specific collections relevant to the history of slavery. The site also provides resources for how to search the Yale library system and links to various databases. While appearing to be a useful and actionable resource the site is not super comprehensive and fails to provide direct contact information for librarians at each institution who could support researchers in further investigation. Most importantly, the site does not contain any contextual information which places its resources within a broader institutional memory – notably, the long integrated histories of Yale and slavery.

  • GLC website

    • This is the website of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The site is a diverse locus of all things related to the GLC and its research. While the GLC houses the majority of other slavery projects at Yale that we discuss on this page locating such resources on the website was surprisingly not intuitive. In this way a space that, in practice (in terms of funding, faculty etc.) serves as a keystone for the study of slavery at Yale and in relation to Yale, it does not have an internet presence that makes these relationships clear or accessible.

  • GLC Annual Conference: Yale and Slavery in Historical Perspective

    • This YouTube "playlist" covers recordings (most about 1.5 hours long) from the 2021 GLC Annual Conference which focused on the research and findings from the Yale and Slavery Research Project. Notably, the Conference discussed a diverse range of topics from art and iconography to religion and to medicine demonstrating slavery's ubiquitous and pervasive effects across the history of Yale.

Strengths

The project focuses on a hugely diverse range of topics related to the co-constitutions of slavery in the U.S. and Yale as an institution. As we have discussed, this is definitely true for the impacts of eugenics.

  • Actionable resources which help to further the conversation and particularly, those which help to support research that continues to unearth histories of slavery (thinking towards the Yale Slavery and Abolition Portal).

  • The project is working in collaboration with the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, meaning the university is not working in a silo, which is important for this kind of research, spanning locations and generations.

  • There are a lot of members from different backgrounds contributing to the project.

  • A conference to present research is useful to disseminate information.